Among these crowded shelves where I sit are more than 100 cookbooks and books on food history. They are shelved immediately behind my writing desk for quick reference and inspiration when the spirit flags during the day. They are a varied lot. At least a half-dozen books on curing meat and another clutch of titles on preserving the harvest. A history of bourbon resting next to a culinary history of mushrooms, which in turn leans on a book of Cuban food. It is an egalitarian crowd, rubbing shoulders just over mine.

Farming, for me, has always been about providing for our table. A thought that had me thinking about the books that have inspired me to cook what we have produced. And in the last 22 years, we have produced 95 percent of the meat we consume and 75 percent of the vegetables, so, we do need a lot of inspiring. I try and cook based on two criteria. The first is giving consideration for what is in season or what we have that is preserved, cured, or frozen. The second is factoring in that the ingredients are easily grown, substituted, or found at a general grocery store (no champagne vinegar required).

Below are five titles that, while not exhaustive, are favorites because to my way of thinking, they are farm friendly. Certainly, plenty of worthy candidates have been left out. But there they rest behind me, whenever I need them, shelved somewhere between the Convivial Dickens and The Wurst! German cookbook.

1. Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden (R. Lundy). As Roy Blount Jr. said, “I declare, Ms. Lundy, this is all so good.” And like all truly good cookbooks, this jewel is part memoir, part travelogue, and mostly an immense resource for those gardening in the Upper South. Flip through it and look for the recipes with an accumulation of grimy fingerprints or splattered with juice. Those are the ones that get referenced and cooked from often. From the first time you fix Lundy’s crookneck squash casserole (p. 208), corn fritters, okra grits and winter tomato gravy, or even turnip custard, you know you are not going to be bored with your garden produce. But you might need an extra stomach or three.

2. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South (J. Edge). This fine collection is drawn from a deep well of knowledge, community cookbooks. Red-eye gravy, perfect biscuits, squirrel dumplings, pickled pigs’ feet, cream of peanut soup, and for the cold winter nights, a glass of frothy syllabub. This is Southern cooking at its best, with one hand on the skillet and the other plunged into the dirt, a shooting of a rabbit while also mentally composing a list of ingredients needed for rabbit pie (p. 187) kind of text. It has roots; water them if you wish to keep them.

3. Greens (T. Head). This is one of the Savor the South cookbooks, put out by the University of North Carolina. Other titles have wonderful names like Tomatoes and Beans and Field Peas or Ham. Each is a slim volume devoted to the history and recipes of the title subject. While I have a dozen from the series, only Thomas Head’s work gets pulled down multiple times a year. Because, in East Tennessee, we grow greens, we eat greens, we love our greens. But even the most devoted greenophile needs some inspiration. Head provides it. Potlikker soups and turnip green gratins grace these pages, as do oysters Rockefeller with collards and, an as yet untried, collard green marmalade. Believe me, there is no excuse to grow bored with the bounty of greens. (Cooking the basic Southern greens, p. 18, for lunch will set you just right for an afternoon of working in the garden or taking a nap. Your choice.)

4. French Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals and Gatherings (S. Reynaud). This choice was a toss-up with the author’s classic, Pork and Sons, a cookbook that starts with killing a 400-pound hog and ends with 350 pages of recipes using everything but the squeal. Why do I like French country cooking? Because so much of it mirrors the essence of Southern cooking, as the Reynaud title indicates: family meals and gatherings. That cross between conviviality and seasonal eating speaks to me of home. With an emphasis on what is fresh and in season and the best way to celebrate its goodness, each page for the small-farm owner is a new way to reinterpret the possibilities in your own larder. The butcher’s wife’s pork chops (p. 228) is just such a recipe, made new depending on the season in which it is cooked.

5. The River Cottage Meat Book (H. Fearnley-Whittingstall). Like the Reynaud book, this work begins with a slaughter, then proceeds nose to tail through the whole pantheon of meat — beef, lamb and mutton, pork, poultry, game, and offal of all sorts, it is all in here. This 2004 work helped shape how we farm and certainly influenced the ways in which I cook. The citrus-braised lamb shanks (p. 300) that we eat only once a year (when we put a lamb in the freezer) are worth the wait.

That last sentence sums up the wisdom found in the pages of these titles: The pleasures of cooking something remarkable at select times of the year. No mid-January fresh strawberries, no lamb shanks whenever you want them. Patience and honor are the best seasonings for the simple good ingredients you bring from your farm to your plate.

Eat, as my grandmother Roberts said, until you have had a sufficiency. That will be enough.

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